There is a young man in my office, a former soldier and a hero of our nation’s wars. And his life is falling apart. There are problems at home and problems at work.

To respect his privacy, and the considerable number of men and women like him who come to see me, I shall say no more. But he has come home from the war a very different man than he was when he left and it is hard to make that transition.

There are a great many times in my priesthood when I know that a person should seek professional psychological help, but for many, the only person they will talk to is a clergyman. A lot of veterans do not like psychologists because of the ones they met in the service, and others have a great suspicion of the Department of Veterans Affairs.

I find that a kind ear does a lot of good, but how much good can a classicist turned priest do?

I knew another veteran, who has been gone many years now, whom I met while I was in seminary in England. He was a retired Anglican priest whom I visited in a nursing home once a week.

After getting to know me, he shared his experiences in World War I in the British army. He told me that once, he was in the open field of battle when a shell exploded, knocking him into a crater. When he awakened, he was immobilized and without a weapon. And on the other side of the crater was an injured German soldier, also immobilized and unarmed. And the two men stared at each other for a full day.

“We were in no man’s land. And we both knew for a fact that when one of the armies found us, they would spare the man from their side and kill the other,” he said. He stopped there and was sad for a while.

It was clear what happened — the British soldier who was speaking to me was now an old man, and it was he who was rescued and his rival shot on the spot.

But while I met him in 1979, he never stopped being in that blast crater in 1917.

Both stories have a similar theme, in that while the soldier leaves the war, the war may not leave the soldier.

In the Iliad of Homer, that magnificent 16,000-line poem celebrating the Trojan War, we read endlessly of combat and killings, of honor and cowardice, heroism and betrayal and all the drama of war. One of the heroes of Homer’s world is the Greek warrior Ajax, the son of Telamon. He was the grandson of the god Zeus and the cousin of the greatest hero, Achilles.

In his youth, he had been educated by the wise centaur Chiron. In adult years he was a great warrior and they called him the “bulwark” of the Greek army at Troy. With incredible bravery he fought to rescue the body of Greek Patroclus from enemy capture and humiliation.

Twice he fought Hector, the greatest of the Trojans, and proved to be his equal. He is one of the very few of Homer’s warriors who is never wounded in combat — at least not on the outside.

The post-Homeric mythic cycles described Ajax’s end. When the other great warrior, Achilles, dies, there is a contest to determine who shall have the dead man’s magnificent armor.

Ajax and Odysseus compete for the honors, but are tied. The men then debate for the honors, but Ajax did not know that Odysseus was getting illicit help in his words from Athena, a goddess. Odysseus got the prize and Ajax got shame after his brilliant war service. He deserved better decorations than the nothing he got.

In a similar manner, men in the half generation before mine who served in Vietnam were denied honors and respect when they ended their service as well, just as the British troops who returned from the American Revolution were shamed in England.

Ajax responded to this public disrespect in two ways. In one account, written by Sophocles, the gods drive Ajax mad and he butchers the livestock of the army, thinking the animals are the men who betrayed him. In the other account, he simply falls into a depressed rage and cannot comfort himself.

In both versions, he commits suicide by falling on his own sword. Suicide, I am told by a young Marine, is the largest cause of death among his colleagues who came back from the current wars.

How can it be that we who live in educated communities are not aware that the post-traumatic stress that these men and women endured in our service has been a problem since the days of Achilles and Agamemnon?

Even in the Hebrew Bible, King Saul is driven mad after spending his life in an endless conflict with the Philistines. It is not as if Homer and the Bible have been unread by educated people.

Gentle reader, if you know veterans, remember to be kind to them, and if they need help, find someone they can talk to. Regardless of your personal political opinions on the war, support programs that assist veterans. Pray for them in your houses of worship. Give them a job if they need one.

If they want to talk, hear them out without judgment. Young Ajax may be in your classroom, workplace, neighborhood or home and perhaps he or she could use a little help.

Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at askfathergregory@verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.

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